From the basement.
“Squad commander”? If accurate, that means some mid-level sergeant. Not exactly a mover and shaker within the Russian military hierarchy.
He might be accurately speaking about what he sees as the general level of morale, but he’s certainly not leading any meaningful group of followers anywhere.
I’d fully expect him to simply be arrested and disappear into the maw of the military prison system; no accidents needed.
On to some bullets?
Or possibly eating a mushroom salad with the wrong kinds of mushrooms in it.
Or if he just hadn’t backed down. At the time, nobody could quite figure out why, and I don’t think it’s become any clearer since then. It didn’t look like there was anyone or anything in a position to stop him before he stormed Putin’s bunker.
Almost certainly he had verbal agreements from oligarchs and/or military personnel and those people chickened out at the last minute.
Someone chickening out at the last minute is the only thing that makes sense. Perhaps Prigozhin was genuinely scared at the thought of success and then having to deal with a post-Putin Russia. A Russia that could very well break apart completely. The thought of thousands of nukes scattered in the hands of who knows how many regional warlords is a genuinely scary thought. That might have been what stopped him.
Aren’t nukes armed by centrally controlled codes, without which they simply cannot be made to work?
Yes and no. You can’t just push a button and make it go without the codes, but if you have a nuke that’s in working order aside from not having the codes, and some time and some competent technicians, it wouldn’t be hard at all to build a new trigger for it, that’s based on your codes.
General Hodges gives some of the most insightful commentary on combat operations in this war. A segment he did earlier this week draws attention to how Ukraine has scored some war-changing strategic hits in the past week that are being largely missed by mainstream media outlets. There have been so many recent Ukrainian hits on Russian refining operations, oil terminals, and operational depth targets that it’s easy to lose sight of some qualitative differences in these hits. Case in point, Russia just lost the capacity to produce helium, which has enormous consequences on a variety of defense-related industries.
US nukes are made that way. Somebody else’s? Who knows? Certainly the answer varies by country and generation of weapon.
Supposedly ours have lots of anti-tamper features such that even a stolen one can’t be made to work even with extraordinary state-level skills and resources. Is that as true of e.g. Pakistan’s or NK’s weapons? No publicly available source provides any insight whatsoever.
I don’t buy it. If the response to tampering is to fully detonate the nuke right where it is, then you suborn it by bringing it to your target and then doing something that detects as tampering. And if it’s anything short of that, then you can, if nothing else, put it in a heavy concrete room with teleoperated systems, let the anti-tampering mechanisms blow it up or whatever, and still salvage all of the fissionable material (which is the hardest part of building a bomb).
The real defense against this, of course, is just to make sure unauthorized people never get their hands on a nuke in the first place. And that failing, you can maybe hope that your antitampering measures slow them down enough to give you a chance to recover it. But if we’re talking a total governmental collapse, it’s hopeless.
I don’t know if this is how they actually do it, but here’s one plausible scenario: manufacture every fissile core with a deliberate flaw or asymmetry unique to that core. To successfully detonate that core requires altering the timing of the explosive lenses so the implosion remains symmetrical. So the arming codes for every nuke include a correcting adjustment parameter for those warheads.
Nukes do have, let’s call them anti-tampering features, so that if one accidentally fell into your hands you could not simply take it and Enola Gay whatever you want, but the point is that if you have a functional nuclear warhead there is weapons-grade plutonium, et cetera, already in there! All you have to do is rebuild the device. This is all pointless speculation, though, because the Russian military does, in fact, have all the codes.
Presupposing it isn’t booby-trapped.
I know that I don’t know, and if I did I wouldn’t be talking about it. But given the expense and the physical size of a US nuclear warhead, and the security / surety concerns surrounding them …
I could easily imagine that any disassembly attempt that got very far would set off e.g. half the explosives, scattering the plutonium pit into shrapnel and dust all over the room. Good luck recovering much useful fissile material from that.
For sure there must exist a safe (enough) way to take them apart for servicing. So then the long pole in the tent becomes keeping that knowledge, and the specialized tools necessary to execute on that knowledge, utterly secret.
Have we successfully done so? Hellifino.
It’s pointless while the Russian military remains one single cohesive entity. But if we’re talking about consequences of a total governmental collapse, then the fragments of the military that have the codes for any given nuke probably aren’t the same fragments who have the nuke itself.
While on the one hand the head of state is presumed to have the only authorization codes (that release the codes that release the codes), on the other hand someone somewhere in the system has to generate that master code. Presumably in a blind, no-copy manner; but who knows?
At the missile misfire, someone was exclaiming in Azerbaijani, Maşaallah, qardaşım! (Well done, my brother!). Ma sha Allah is an Arabic phrase meaning ‘What God has willed’, but it’s used to mean ‘Bravo!’, and here it’s totally sarcastic (but with a connotation of resignation to fate).
Elsewhere, there are unconfirmed reports that he fell out of a window.
The Kremlin said Ivanov died on Friday without providing the cause of death or giving other details.
Fell on a bullet.